Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Thursday, March 08, 2018

Relativism, Proportionalism, Amoris Laetitia

When B-16 decried relativism, as he often did, there was a good reason. Relativism is closely connected to proportionalism, which underlies Amoris Laetitiae. Clearly, Benedict 'smelled the sheep' who were in the fullness of priesthood; that is, Bishops. And the smell was not pleasant.

...While in the prime of his career, Grisez in The Way of the Lord Jesus (1983)
deals with the moral theory we call proportionalism. Not only does he
describe it there as an appeal to the proportion of good and bad as a
basis of moral judgment, but he critiques it as a misconstrual of
morality. It undermines the absoluteness of moral norms, he contends,
and makes possible the unravelling of unconditional commitments such as
are made by spouses in holy matrimony. We must be careful though not to
think of proportionalism as some kind of inchoate, arbitrary arrangement
which happens to be at the service of moral actors. It really is a
conceptual framework or mentality which then is made habitual after
repeated personal usage.

Proportionalism is, not surprisingly, subject to an exacting assessment in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor
(1993). There, Saint John Paul II says that proportionalism cannot be
considered a sound moral theory because its precepts are always relative
and open to exceptions. The upshot of this mentality, he argues, would
be to deny that there is a universally valid objective morality. He goes
on to observe that only a morality which acknowledges certain norms as
valid always and for everyone, with no exceptions, can guarantee the
ethical foundation of society....

You should recognize the formulation 'always, for everyone, ...no exceptions,' because that's the foundation of the questions addressed to Pp. Francis by Cdl. Burke et al. If has been more than 500 days since those questions were asked, and there is no response from the Pope.